


The Dream Where We Pull the Bodies out of the Lake

by Trapelo_Road475



Category: Emergency!
Genre: First Kiss, M/M, Stream of Consciousness
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-07-29
Updated: 2014-07-29
Packaged: 2018-02-10 22:46:39
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,536
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2043156
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Trapelo_Road475/pseuds/Trapelo_Road475
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Roy is in love with Johnny, and there is something mad about it, and he doesn't care.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Dream Where We Pull the Bodies out of the Lake

**Author's Note:**

> As it happens I write a lot of different scenarios for Roy and Johnny's first kiss. They may or may not exist in the same continuity, however you like.

It is something mad, to be in love with his partner.

At first, Roy wasn’t even sure he ought to call it friendship, wasn’t sure he ought to let it slip past the clear and even boundary of professionals. From the day he met Johnny there was something else nagging at him, something from the far side of good sense, and while Roy couldn’t pinpoint for sure, he figured that the first time they’d gone on a run together - a run where they had to work side-by-side, unsupervised and navigating a thorny tangle of half-legalities - sometime after that, riding back to station, was when _friend_ sat up and socked him hard in the chest, and he felt the ache of it the whole week. Johnny jumped from _Gage_ , who wouldn’t deign to sign his paramedic application til he was good and ready, to _John_ , who worked his tail off in training, to _Johnny_ , who was his partner. Johnny say next to him in the cab of the squad and that felt alright. He felt like someone Roy could stand to ride next to a long, long time, if it came to it. 

Johnny came into it skittish, puffed up with bravado like a scrawny alley tomcat, came into it knocking heads with everyone from Doctor Brackett to their Engineer at 51. Came into it knocking heads because he was too young to let himself say I don’t know, are you sure, how does it work. Excepting when he was with Roy. He never shut up, when they were together, unless it was work, when he never shut up for good reason. He was a mess of questions, and scowling, clouded silence, and then a mess of questions again. Roy could’ve driven them three times around the county and Johnny still could’ve had a question left by the end of it. He might’ve gone hoarse and had to write it down by them, but he still would’ve.

Johnny wanted to _know_ , and it drew Roy fiercely to him, as tightly as if he’d been clawed by an animal. Johnny actually _knew_ a lot of things but he pretended he knew everything, which drove Roy insane half the time. Johnny wasn’t any fool. He was young, a firefighter, lately a rescue man and his mouth and his pride permanently in gear before his brain. The young and the overconfident, typically the same men, were usually rescue men. Roy had been given the ignominious task of sifting out the ones with enough real sense and potential to be paramedics, and nearly every choice he made had been questioned by someone. 

(Captain Bailey, at 10s, had actually laughed at him when he called to tell him he’d accepted Johnny’s application. It wasn’t a cruel laugh, just a bark to say alright, it’s your funeral. _John Gage?_ Yeah, John R. Gage it says right here on the application Cap so with your approval, thank you very much.)

Roy is never certain why, out of the six men who first took the program, they shunted most of the recruitment and the decision making to him. There were probably better men for it. There were doctors, and nurses (what would the program have looked like, with someone like Dixie calling the shots? Probably, Roy thinks, would’ve gotten past the legislature about a month faster), and men who’d been fighting fires and saving lives since before Roy’s voice had broke, since before he’d thought for real of joining the department. But no, it was him.

But if it wasn’t, he thinks, who would’ve chosen Johnny, with his stray-cat wary arrogance, with his long fingers and his boyish face and his skinny, hunched-in shoulders? 

Why did he choose him? 

Johnny never shut up. Johnny butted heads with anyone who even skimmed his pride. Johnny asked too many questions and not enough. Johnny was too young. Johnny was too much this and too little that. Johnny sat with him in the squad and it felt right, and Johnny lay down in the bunk next to his after lights-out and it felt good, it felt sane, like he was a lightning bolt that had touched ground and stayed and held and grown roots.

That was what love felt like. That was crazy, loving his partner like that. You did love your brothers, that was fair. You never said it. Never thought of it like lightning. Threw arms over shoulders and sighed inside when they came out coughing, and crumpled in the gut like an empty pop can when they didn’t. Sometimes they didn’t. Johnny might not, sometime. Fool, mad he was, he loved Johnny anyway.

They have their own lives that cycle through together like so: they come to work, they’re on duty, they’re in the squad, they’re at the station, they’re on calls, they’re at the hospital. They come in clean one day and come out the other side with blood still stinging rust in their sinuses. Someone dies. Most people don’t. They have time on their side. They are time. A squeaked few minutes one way or the other. Miracle time. They work side-by-side. Johnny makes him laugh. Johnny backs off when he laughs. Roy coaxes him with scraps, of jokes, of foolish things he did once, like becoming a father. Johnny tells terrible jokes. Sometimes they sleep. Sometimes they eat. Roy falls in wrenching love with him. Johnny looks at him sometimes inscrutably, and then down at the log book, or the map, or something. Johnny would make a toothpick model of Lady Liberty, Roy thinks, if it meant he didn’t have to look Roy in the eye over some particular hanging thread of conversation.

It’s late. It’s often late. Or very early. Their nights and days blur, not really beginning or ending, shift to home, home to shift. There are long shifts. This is a long shift. 

Roy would ask him to breakfast. It’s usually a good idea. Johnny eats like he’s sixteen. Roy isn’t sure how old he really is. Old enough. For what? It doesn’t matter. Joanne makes good breakfast, and she likes to feed his partner.

Johnny hovers, for a moment, blinking in the morning haze. The air smells wet and hollow and grey. Smoke in the mountains and dead things left by the tide. 

It has been a long shift. There is blood on his work boots. There is blood on the hems of their uniform pants. If it comes out of a person, they’ve probably had it on them at some point. Alcohol doesn’t look good on the second go-round. Neither does rat poison. Roy can see, in Johnny’s head, someone is still screaming. It’s ringing in his eyes, when Johnny asks him,

"Will you come home with me?"

It has to be the morning haze, the smell of smoke and blood, or the screaming, because Johnny - his body clenched tight, his eyes narrow and his nostrils wide - would never ask that so directly. 

Roy is exhausted. He is so tired it hurts deep in the marrow of his bones and one of his uniform shirts is permanently out of commission. He doesn’t feel clean. The dank fog that shades the city morning doesn’t help.

"Alright," he says. 

And Johnny looks at him like he didn’t expect that answer, didn’t expect any answer at all. Roy puts a hand on his shoulder, doesn’t clap him hard like a brother would, just lays it there, as if he has a right to, as if Johnny’s shoulder is simply an extension of his own, where if he needed an arm, he would find one. A hand. A touch. Johnny needs it now. So does Roy. 

Roy is madly in love with the tomcat fireman, the paramedic now with the bared teeth at the scene, breathing someone else’s misting lifeblood into his nostrils they carry the city in their bodies now, the smoke and the spit and the puke and the tears and the blood jesus the blood, no one mentioned that, did they, you don’t really know the meaning of trauma until you smell it, the whole of it, wet and raw and glistening on your molars.

"Alright," Roy says. And because it is morning and the shrieking of a hysterical woman whose child was never going to get up again hasn’t stopped and because Brackett tore a stripe off them both because he couldn’t unsever a man’s spinal cord and because shirts have been ruined and because they stopped caring three weeks ago about little details like showering or eating onions or snoring in the squad between runs because they are partners and part and parcel of each other, because of all of this and Johnny’s eyes which are beautiful when he does look, look up, Roy kisses him. On the face and on the mouth, in an awkward slide. 

Johnny lets him. Not lets him. Leans into him. Shivers all the way down. 

"Don’t fuck around," Johnny says. "Not now. Please, Roy, not fucking now."

"I’m not." Johnny talks too much. "Look at me. I’m not."

Johnny looks at him with that high-water gaze, a shine on the surface. “Me neither,” he says. 

"You hungry?"

"Yeah."

"Let’s go."

**Author's Note:**

> Title from Richard Siken's "Scheherazade" -
> 
> "Tell me about the dream where we pull the bodies out of the lake,  
> And dress them in warm clothes again  
> How it was late, and no one could sleep, the horses running  
> until they forget that they are horses..."


End file.
